At this time of year, we weigh the good and the bad and now there are experts to help us get it right.

When you reflect this Thanksgiving weekend on the good things in life, don't stop there. Take a hard look at the things that make you unhappy, as well. Then compare the two.

"It has to be honest," says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in happiness studies.

Focusing only on the good things, he says, may bring only a fleeting happiness. "You're getting it at the cost of have a distorted reality. And realism is good."

Schimmack says Thanksgiving can be a good time for many to really grasp that the good in our day-to-day lives outnumbers the bad.

But Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, another happiness professor, says gratitude is not just for Thanksgiving. She likes the idea of counting blessings so much, it's worth doing on a regular basis.

"It's like losing weight. You have to stay on the diet and exercise regularly for it to work," says Lyubomirsky, author of the bestseller The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

In her research, Lyubomirsky asked one group of subjects to keep a gratitude journal. For 10 weeks, they regularly jotted down the things they were grateful for – relationships, nice meals, a good day at work. Another group was told to write down daily hassles and annoyances.

The result, not surprisingly, was that members of the grateful group was happier and more optimistic. More than that, however, they spent more time exercising and reported feeling healthier, with fewer headaches, coughing or nausea. They even had less acne – a point Lyubomirsky makes with teenagers.

"Young people have a tendency to take everything for granted," she says.

Just as Schimmack stresses that gratitude has to be honest, Lyubomirsky says it's important to pick a strategy for expressing gratitude that works best for you. In another study, she found that subjects told to write in their grateful journals three times a week were less happy than those doing so only once a week.

So, true gratitude can't be forced.

Schimmack and Lyubomirsky are part of the growing academic focus on happiness. The field has it's own publication, the Journal of Happiness Studies, Pennsylvania State University has an entire department dedicated to it and mass-market books are hitting the shelves.

There are even several happy blogs, including Lyubomirsky's, blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-happiness and happinessproject.typepad.com, in which author Gretchen Rubin spends a year trying every recipe for happiness she can find.

"It's really an explosion in the field," says Schimmack, who was trained in Germany and is based at U of T's Mississauga campus.

Despite the recent burst of activity, he says happiness studies remain largely misunderstood. Too often, he says, people want simple answers, such as the notion that money can't buy happiness or that selfish people are truly unhappy. These are gross oversimplifications, he says.

The things that make people happy, even for the antimaterialist, tend to cost money, Schimmack says. Want your family to be healthy? Insurance and a safe car cost money. Enjoy camping? Tents and sleeping bags cost money. Want to send you kids to college? That costs big money.

"A lot of the people who think of their lives as being nonmaterialistic often spend more money than the people who are materialistic," Schimmack observes.

"People in Canada and the United States will say, 'Money is not important to me.'

"But the reason for that is, they have it."

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